My Grandma was not a great cook — maybe not even a good cook: she was a home cook who fed threshing crews, a husband and seven children on very little money. But she could make bread: my Mom remembers her making bread in a huge dishpan, four loaves at a time. She made jam, too, and I am sorry not to have her recipe for berry jam (she died before I got interested in canning) — I don’t know what kind of berries she used. Not strawberries, but maybe blackberries and raspberries together? I don’t know. She made excellent chicken and noodles and a nice cocoa cake. On holidays she brought the rolls.

Mom made rolls, too, but not for Thanksgiving or Christmas. She liked to make “bread rolls,” a less rich roll dough. She liked to use dried milk. Grandma always used fresh milk and scalded it. She warmed the flour and the eggs. She used oil rather than shortening or butter.

After Grandma died at ninety-six, I took over her roll-making job: I make yeast-risen oil rolls. I make cloverleaf rolls in a muffin tin greased with Crisco because that is what my Mom always did. The recipe comes from Grandma. The shape comes from Mom. My contribution is sometimes to sneak in a little whole wheat flour, but everybody else likes it better if I don’t: the consensus is that we should be allowed to eat white flour on holidays, along with pie and gravy and stuffing and whipped cream. “It’s only for one day,” Mom says. Two, if we’re counting Christmas, but hey, why be literal-minded?

Here is my grandmother’s recipe for rolls.

Scald 1 cup of milk and pull off burner to cool.

Dissolve 4 and 1/2 tsp of yeast (two packets) in 1/2 cup lukewarm water by sprinkling the yeast into the water in a one-cup liquid measuring cup and beating it with a fork

To the scalded milk, add:

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1/3 cup corn oil. You can add this stuff while the milk is still warm — it will speed the cooling.

While the milk is cooling to lukewarm, if you want to imitate my grandmother you need to warm the flour and eggs. This is how you do it.

Turn on your oven to warm or low. Measure 5 cups sifted flour into a glass, metal or ceramic bowl. Bury 2 large whole eggs in the shell in the flour. Turn off the oven. Set the bowl in the oven for a few minutes until the flour is warm to the touch. This is a good trick for cold kitchens: the warmed flour gives the yeast a little boost.

Remove eggs from flour (or just take 2 eggs out of your fridge) Beat the eggs until blended and whisk them into your milk-oil-sugar mixture. Pour liquids, including eggs over flour. Add dissolved yeast.

Knead until dough is uniform, soft and spongy — about ten minutes by hand. The dough should be soft and light, but not sticky. If it is a humid day, you might have to add more flour, but you only want to do that if it is impossible to knead.

Cover your bread bowl with a warm, damp tea towel (I like linen and find that dampening it and microwaving it for twenty seconds gets it warm enough).

Set bowl in warm oven (warm from before — your oven should not be on at this point) or other warm draft-free spot. We have been known to run our clothes dryer for awhile before turning it off and setting the covered bowl of dough inside to rise. Let dough rise until double — I’m going to say an hour, but you need to go by volume rather than time.

Punch dough down and let it rise again. This will take half the time of the first rise.

While dough is rising the second time, get out your Crisco vegetable shortening that you bought to make pie crust. Grease two normal-size 12 cup muffin tins or 1 12-cup muffin tin and one 6-cup one. This recipe will yield eighteen to twenty-four cloverleaf dinner rolls, depending on how big you make them. If you have extra dough, plop it in a small greased bowl and make a bun.

When dough has doubled again, punch it down and form cloverleaf rolls by pinching off three balls of dough. They should be about the size of the circle you make with your thumb and forefinger, unless you have huge hands, in which case they can be a little smaller. Place three balls of dough in each greased muffin cup: as the dough rises and spreads it will fill the muffin tin and leave you with rolls.

While your rolls complete their last rise, go ahead and preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Do not put the rolls in it yet. The rolls are ready to go in when they have risen above the edge of the muffin cups.

Bake rolls in 425 degree oven for 10 to 12 minutes. Serve hot — or at least warm. You can eat them cold later — and you will, if there are any left. We eye them jealously and fight for our share. Sometimes we make more during the holiday weekend if we feel we have been shorted.

Food Notes: These rolls are simple and good. You can add a touch of butter to the milk mixture if you like. You can also substitute up to 1 cup of whole wheat flour for unbleached flour or bread flour — add more than that and you will lose their marvelous lightness and beautiful creamy color. My brother would say just lose the whole wheat flour altogether and my Mom would say to hold it to a quarter cup. You can, of course, use only one packet of yeast or 2 and 1/4 teaspoons — if you do, things will just take a little longer: these rolls take me about two and a half to three hours total time.

Oh to have had your grandma to 96! And then to have this special recipe. I started baking bread for the first time about a year ago, and was actually wondering if I’d like to make a yeast roll for Thanksgiving. I would like to try this recipe…it seems to me that as a grandmother now myself, I have a few traditions I need to pass along. Maybe this will become a new one for me! And I do relate to “trying” to put a little whole wheat flour in…or similar attempts across the other holiday foods. There will be many items brought to our holiday meals that make me slightly shudder, but again, Tradition! Loved this! Debra

This post brought back many good memories of holidays past. I wish I had had the foresight to ask my grandmothers for their favorite recipes when they were alive. But, at that age (I was only in my early teens) I thought they’d live forever.

I agree with Cheryl – missing my mother and grandmothers for almost 30 years. When are young we do not think about their mortality. A good lesson that I should be teaching my children our family recipes. These rolls sound yummy. I don’t know if I’ll find the time to make them but will save this recipe for some special Sunday dinner.

The women in my mother’s family are long-lived. Mom is eighty-one and still cooks most of Thanksgiving dinner herself: she gets up at 5 AM to get the turkey in the oven. I roast and peel chestnuts, polish silverware, make the pie fillings and rolls, write out the menu. Sometimes I get to mash the potatoes (and I certainly get to peel them). Mom does the gravy, stuffs the bird, makes the pie crust.

Boy, this recipe and your story about it makes my mouth water. I already feel the hot roll in the palm of hand a swath of butter oozing in the middle of that cloverleaf crevice. A wisp of steam sighs above it. Perhaps my daughter and I can attempt a Gluten Free version of it next week. I’ll report back if we do.

If you can manage gluten-free dinner rolls, Laura, you will have a lot of friends and grateful fans. If you do manage to create them, I hope you’ll send the recipe to me so that I can try it and post it as a resource for others.

Thanks, John. I can see I’m going to have to tell some Grandma Carroll stories — there are many: for instance, the barely visible Siamese cat in the painting, Charley, used to hide behind the stove and jump out and scare people.

Could be, Joanne. The jam was reddish-black or blackish red. It might have just been wild blackberries, although I don’t remember her going out and picking them: we spent a lot of time with her when we were little kids since my Mom worked.

Yes, Lauren. I’ve always said what my family kept from their heritage in Ireland was the habit of drinking tea with milk and an inveterate love of bread and dairy products — not a gluten or dairy-free person among us. I always say that it is because my ancestors raised sheep and cattle and ate bread whenever they could get it.

My Mom is a better cook than her mother, but she only had three children and more money. I am a better cook than my Mom (more versatile) and I have no children at all. We make rolls for any company occasion and many times just for ourselves. I’ve got a sourdough starter going again and have to bake with it at least once a week.

This sounds so wonderful that I’m tempted to make rolls this year. I never heard of warming the flour first, although I’ve set eggs out to warm to room temperature before use. I’ll have to try that. Thanks for sharing!

You’re welcome. Grandma always did it: winter houses are cold out here — few double windows, inadequate insulation, no planning for cold snaps when we get them. And it’s damp because we are close to the water.

Sharyn this is Fabulous! I love family stories, traditions and methods of cooking from past generations! Warming of the flour was so interesting and really made sense!! I remember my mother using Crisco is many of her baking recipes. It is truly special that you’re carrying on your Grandma’s memory through her recipes.

Thanks, Linda. My grandmother always talked about our great big drafty house and she used to hold up holiday dinners because her rolls hadn’t risen enough: that’s when we developed the dryer trick. But, as you can see, she did everything she could to get them to optimum rising temperature.